Belgrad, Smederevo, Pancevo, Subotica, Krusevac…
July – November 2023

Since its first edition in 2010, MikroFAF has presented more than 500 films from all over the world, and developed from a local into an international platform for short film. Road Edition of the festival will be held as a Serbian tour, with the aims of decentralising art programmes, audience growing and reviewing the whole short film scene development in the last 14 years.

From its very beginning, MikroFAF has been following the needs of the scene and its audience, going through all kinds of changes and gaining a specific status on the alternative film scene. At this moment, we believe it’s very important that, besides in Belgrade, the festival is held in other local communities, especially those where art events are less available. Also, we want to step outside conventional frameworks and get back to our roots, when we were screening films in venues not originally planned for cinema programmes.

Such an approach gives us an opportunity to strengthen collaboration with our colleagues from the independent scene in Serbia and gather a more heterogeneous audience through the screenings at public places – such as local parks, alternative gathering points, squares, streets and cultural centres. In this way, we will motivate the local community to consume the art content, and also to get involved in public discussion and jurying films in the competitive programmes. In all towns where the festival will be held, the audience will vote for the best films in given categories, and films with the most votes will be screened in November in Belgrade, the MikroFAF’s birthplace, at the Film Archive Museum.

During the selection process, the main criterion for each programme section was to show films winning MikroFAF awards during the last 13 years, and having significant reception both among the professional community and wider audience. The idea of re-screening those films has come out from the need to apply the time-passing test together with the audience, having in mind that film production has been rapidly changing since 2010. The greater availability of technologies that contribute to the easier materialising ideas in audio-visual arts oftenly affected the screenwriting and directing process, while on the other hand, high production expenses, lack of equipment and post-production facilities were bypassed with smart director’s solutions or more originally set screenplays. All those films not only tell the stories but also witness the times of technological development and new phenomena (such as viral videos) being spontaneously noted by MikroFAf in all those years.

The audience will have the opportunity to see selections and vote in the following categories:

• Short DIY Film. Refers to films of all genres (fiction, documentary, animated, experimental…), made in non-professional circumstances, without the involvement of film professionals and without professional obligations during or after the production.
• Independent Short Film. Refers to indie films of all genres, produced in professional circumstances and with significant financial support, but within a creative environment free from commercial and producer’s pressure.
• MikroFAF special. In this category we will show awarded and well-received films from the MikroFAF special category, changing from year to year (Viral film, Loud film, Power film, Caged film, Limbo film, Controversy film, Beyond the fragments…). In this special programme, we will also be able to review the main social themes that dominated at the global level in the past decade and were present in the special categories of the previous MikroFAF editions.

Within the non-competitive programme, the audience will have the opportunity to see the most important films made by the youngest authors and some of the jury members from the previous MikroFAF editions, as well as to participate in the talks about enduring time test, educational film practices for the youth and rethinking terms “do-it-yourself” and “indie film”.

Free entry!
Welcome!